Ok. found my issue. For some reason, I had 50-user.conf enabled and it has some weird stuff that the new patches don't like. I did 'eselect fontconfig disable 50-user.conf' and my fonts are looking good now.

Strangely, firefox and thunderbird were behaving differently. Firefox had weird fonts with 50-user.conf but thunderbird was fine with it. Now, both of them are fine. But its strange that there is something that makes them behave differently.

50-user.conf does nothing but include your personal configuration... so the problem lies there.

Yeah, I know. I meant my ~/.fonts.conf has something that the new patches don't like. That file gets created every time I touch KDE font settings and it looks like a bug with KDE that file is not in sync with global settings although I select the same things like full hinting with RGB. So, I changed KDE to use system settings and got rid of that file.

Does anyone have a list of things to mask off the top of their head to get fonts back to how they were say, last week with the devnull overlay? After this last update of world my fonts look horrible, especially in kde apps. no settings were changed with eselect.
*Edit*

heres a link to what i'm talking about, the I's and 1s especially look bad. Fonts seem too thin overall. has the previous freetype been completly removed from the overlay?

Another edit: After much experimenting i got most of my fonts looking good again, but Segoe UI still has the problem with I's that it didn't have before. Is there some patch that used to be included with the devnull freetype that isn't included now?

OK! After a couple hours of experimentation i finally got things back looking good again. KDE and GTK are displaying fonts the same way again, and the rendering is good. In case anyone is wondering what i did:

OK! After a couple hours of experimentation i finally got things back looking good again. KDE and GTK are displaying fonts the same way again, and the rendering is good. In case anyone is wondering what i did:

add mask >=x11-libs/cairo-1.8.6-r1

So in other words, don't use the cleartype-like patchset but rather newspr.

OK! After a couple hours of experimentation i finally got things back looking good again. KDE and GTK are displaying fonts the same way again, and the rendering is good. In case anyone is wondering what i did:

add mask >=x11-libs/cairo-1.8.6-r1

So in other words, don't use the cleartype-like patchset but rather newspr.

yes for sure. with the cleartype patched version, fonts in gtk apps looked too blurry as compared to kde apps, on my screen at least.

yes for sure. with the cleartype patched version, fonts in gtk apps looked too blurry as compared to kde apps, on my screen at least.

KDE doesn't use Cairo for its font rasterization, so that would explain the difference.

Frankly, I don't know what all the confusion is about. As I understand it, upstream FreeType now supports rasterizing font glyphs using subpixel filtering. Shouldn't libXft, cairo, and qt4 all simply be using the pixmaps directly from FreeType without altering them? It seems like everyone is trying to do their own tweaks, and we wind up with a "too many cooks spoil the broth" situation. Am I missing something?

yes for sure. with the cleartype patched version, fonts in gtk apps looked too blurry as compared to kde apps, on my screen at least.

KDE doesn't use Cairo for its font rasterization, so that would explain the difference.

Frankly, I don't know what all the confusion is about. As I understand it, upstream FreeType now supports rasterizing font glyphs using subpixel filtering. Shouldn't libXft, cairo, and qt4 all simply be using the pixmaps directly from FreeType without altering them? It seems like everyone is trying to do their own tweaks, and we wind up with a "too many cooks spoil the broth" situation. Am I missing something?

I highly agree with that statement. Relying upon one lib such as freetype for the entire system makes everything more consistant. I think the problem currently maybe some issues with copyright infringement on the code freetype uses.

I just know that with newspr enabled and properly configured, my systems fonts look amazing, better than I've seen on any other OS (including MacOSX/Vista). Very sharp and easy on the eyes. It would be nice if this font rendering could somehow become the default in gentoo. Looking at gentoo screenshots on this forum, its "clear" that many users would benefit from better fonts!

Is this tar+http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/misc/gentoo-lcd-filtering.tar.bz2 still updated?

It will be as soon as I can find some time to work on it..

No problem, or is a newer version somewhere in an overlay? Anyway what about this new cleartype? Can someone please sum the changes up?_________________Workstation: 5.1 SurroundSound, LIRC remote control; Laptop [IBM-T43]: patched sources, s2disk/ram, fingerprint sensor

Just as a test, I removed the overlay and tried just using the keyword masked versions in the main portage tree. The difference is so slight (for me at least), that I am just sticking with the packages in the main tree for now.

Edit: Here are the versions and USE flags I'm using. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has the same experience.

Just as a test, I removed the overlay and tried just using the keyword masked versions in the main portage tree. The difference is so slight (for me at least), that I am just sticking with the packages in the main tree for now.

Just as a test, I removed the overlay and tried just using the keyword masked versions in the main portage tree. The difference is so slight (for me at least), that I am just sticking with the packages in the main tree for now.

Edit: Here are the versions and USE flags I'm using. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has the same experience.